Flogo – a floating foam logo generator

Check out this floating foam letter machine that was shown off at last year’s IFA show in Berlin, the German equivalent of CES. The contraption is called Flogos, and comes from a company named SnowMasters based out of Alabama.

The Flogos machine consists of a helium and compressed air bubble generator positioned below a custom stencil cutout. As the bubbles form, they are forced into a relatively tight formation as they exit the stencil. Once a nice thick layer is established, a small plastic arm is dragged across the surface, liberating the foam from the stencil allowing it to float through the sky as you can see in the video below.

We think it’s pretty cool, and we wouldn’t mind having one around just for kicks. If you were to lay some stencils over a tweaked version of this foam generator we featured last year, you could probably have your own floating foam printer up and running in no time.

Stick around to see the video from IFA that originally caught our attention.

@fabien, Who cares if they’ve got a patent number on their site? And it is a form of physical advertising that doesn’t leave any actual trash left over so I will overlook the minuscule bit of bubble liquid spread into the environment by the few of these machines that exist. If you want to complain about environmental stuff http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03spill.html

@notmyfault2000: Helium is refined from natural gas deposits. It’s too light to stay in the atmosphere and eventually floats off into space. Natural gas reserves are directly proportional to helium reserves.

This is a neat machine, would be great at our meetings (not everyone listens) colored bubbles would be great but UV bubble mix would be better and have a much cooler effect at night. Sell these to the ravers and you have your main market.

I’ve been asked by PM to expand on this for a few folks waiting for me to prototype something.. Be patient on a model- my Real Soon Now list’s a bit full. But for the moment- here’s the fleshing out:

Your basic “bubble” of any soap based chemistry tends to be mostly transparent at the single bubble level. That “mostly” qualifier applies to effects like scattering and diffraction which in bulk masses of bubbles produce an appearance of “white” as the reflectivity averages a net balance.

Which makes any color of Laser inherently be reflected plus diffused by each bubble’s inner and outer wall. Further details like power per unit of area calcs are out of scope here.

The simplest videos showing the effect are those of a red Laser bursting a blue balloon inside a red balloon.

Thus, dyes could potentially reproduce the effect in dyed masses of bubbles.

Oh, there’s a whole basic field we could play “Laser Whack-A-Bubble” in. By tuning dye and bubble ratios to interact with Lasers of varied color, focus and beam diameter.

IF any of us make something AWESOME from all this- do please open source it as a matter of Karma..

Using 100% O2 in some foam areas and 100% H2 in others could make it go from ignition to detonation..

Don’t try that one– EVER, lest ye wish to meet Darwin.

The history lesson to close this for now describes how a Razor blade became a unit of relative Laser power: